Johann Wolfgang

Dbereiner
(13 December 1780 24 March 1849) was a
German chemist who is best known for work that
foreshadowed the periodic law for the chemical
elements

Triads
In the year 1829, Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner, a
German scientist, was the first to classify elements
into groups based on John Dalton's assertions. He
grouped the elements with similar chemical
properties into clusters of three called 'Triads'. The
distinctive feature of a triad was the atomic mass
of the middle element. When elements were
arranged in order of their increasing atomic mass,
the atomic mass of the middle element was
approximately the arithmetic mean of the other
two elements of the triad.

John Alexander Reina

Newlands

Octet Rule
Says that atoms tend to gain, lose or share
electrons so as to have eight electrons in their
outer electron shell. It is a very useful rule but you
should also know that there are many bonding
situations where it does not apply. As you learn to
use the octet rule, also learn to recognize
situations where it does not apply and disregard it
in those situations.

Julius Lothar Meyer

Dmitri Ivanovich
Mendeleev
Julius Lothar Meyer (18301895) and Dmitri
Ivanovich Mendeleev (18341907) worked at the
University of Heidelberg only five years apart
both under the direction of Robert Bunsenbut

they arrived there with significantly different

backgrounds. Meyer was virtually born into a
scientific career. He came from a medical family of
Oldenburg, Germany, and first pursued a medical
degree. In medical school he became interested in
chemistry, especially physiological topics like gases
in the blood. Mendeleev was born in Tobolsk,
Siberia, where his father taught Russian literature
and his mother owned and operated a glassworks.
His early contacts with political exiles gave him a
lifelong love of liberal causes, and his freedom to
roam the glassworks stimulated an interest in
business and industrial chemistry.

Meyer and Mendeleev were among the young

chemists attending the Karlsruhe Congress in
1860, and both were impressed with Stanislao
Cannizzaros presentation of Amedeo Avogadros
hypothesis and the light it shed on the question of
atomic weights. For both, writing a textbook proved
to be the impetus for developing the periodic table
that is, a device to present the more than 60
known elements in an intelligible fashion.

Henry Gwyn Jeffreys

Moseley
Atomic Number
Moseley's outstanding contribution to the science
of physics was the justification from physical laws
of the previous empirical and chemical concept of
the atomic number. This stemmed from his
development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra.
Moseley's Law justified many concepts in chemistry
by sorting the chemical elements of the periodic
table of the elements in a quite logical order based
on their physics.
Before Moseley and his law, atomic numbers had
been thought of as a semi-arbitrary ordering
number, vaguely increasing with atomic weight but
not strictly defined by it. Moseley's discovery
showed that atomic numbers were not arbitrarily
assigned, but rather, they have a strong physical
basis. Moseley redefined the idea of atomic
numbers from its previous status as an ad hoc
numerical tag to help sorting the elements, in
particular in the Periodic Table, into a real and
objective whole-number quantity that was

experimentally measurable. Furthermore, as noted

by Bohr, Moseley's law provided a reasonably
complete experimental set of data that supported
the (new from 1911) conception by Ernest
Rutherford and Antonius van den Broek of the
atom, with a positively-charged nucleus
surrounded by negatively-charged electrons in
which the atomic number is understood to be the
exact physical number of positive charges (later
discovered and called protons) in the central
atomic nuclei of the elements.